From the cosmic sounds of Sun Ra to the P-Funk of George Clinton, from the electro beats of Afrika Bambaataa to the fusion intersections of Janelle Monáe, by way of the painting of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the speculative thought of authors such as Kodwo Eshun, African American musicians, artists and intellectuals have fused African iconography and science fiction to imagine alternative scenarios to a past marked by slavery and racial segregation, opening up new possibilities for Black identity.

The term Afrofuturismo was coined in 1993 by the writer Mark Dery to describe a way of thinking and an aesthetic capable of interweaving historical memory, myth, spirituality and technology, bringing Black culture and its tension towards the future back to the centre. A fluid cultural horizon, hard to define as a “movement”, which finds in music its most fertile ground: across jazz, hip-hop, soul, reggae, dub, funk and techno.

The exhibition offers a non-linear and openly non-exhaustive journey through this imaginary, starting from a triad of figures who transformed musical and symbolic language: Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra, George Clinton at the helm of the Mothership and Lee “Scratch” Perry with the sound laboratory of Black Ark Studio, all the way to the most contemporary variations.

Afrofuturism is a cultural process in continuous becoming, one inside which we have perhaps already travelled without realising it.

Ideata e curata da Juanita Apraez Murillo